New Delhi: After weeks of denials, Pakistan today did another volte face admitting some or all of the terrorists, who carried out the November 26 Mumbai terror attacks, could have been its nationals.

Speaking to CNN-IBN in an exclusive interview, Natioanl Security Advisor Mahmud Ali Durrani said Pakistan was examining the letter written by lone arrested attacker Ajmal Kasab.

Asked if he would admit that Kasab and some or all of the ten attackers could have been Pakistani, Mr Durrani said, ”’Could be-could be- that’s all I will say as of now, while the investigations are still being completed.”

Mr Durrani’s comment comes on a day the Pakistan government softened its war rhetoric. Mr Durrani told the channel categorically, that no extra troops mobilisation had occurred on the Pakistani side of the border and LoC in the past few weeks.

Mumbai:
The State Bank of India, the country’s largest bank, has had to shut
down its corporate website after overseas hackers tried to break in.

While the bank said that transactions took place through www.onlinesbi.com, a senior SBI source said that the transactions were slow as the entire system was under watch.

The country’s largest bank decided to shut down its corporate website www.sbi.co.in
on Wednesday evening when hackers blocked some of the pages. The bank
also noticed unusually high traffic on its website on Wednesday.

Subsequently, the website was blocked with a ‘service unavailable’ or ‘our site is under maintenance’ pasted on www.sbi.co.in.

“We
have informed the Reserve Bank of India and the cyber cell of the
Mumbai Police, which are looking into the issue,” said a senior bank
executive. The police and SBI suspect that the hackers are based
overseas.

A Mumbai Police officer said that the cyber cell was
investigating the complaint but did not share details: “It is big and
the implications may be large.”

SBI sources, on their part, said
that no evidence has been found of loss of data or consumers getting
affected. “We suspect that the hackers wanted some information from the
website and disrupt the whole system,” an executive, who did not wish
to be named, said.

Amazing Christmas Decorations from Around the World

The tradition of using small candles to light up the Christmas tree dates back to at least the middle of the XVIIth century. However, it took two centuries for the tradition to become widely established first in Germany and soon spreading to Eastern Europe.

Candles for the tree were glued with melted wax to a tree branch or attached by pins. Around 1890, candleholders were first used for Christmas candles. Between 1902 and 1914, small lanterns and glass balls to hold the candles started to be used.

Palácio Avenida. Christmas in the enchanted palace is a spectacular public concert in this beautifully lit HSBC historic bank building in downtown Curitba, Brazil, with children in costumessinging out of every window

What makes us feel spiritual? It could be the quieting of a small area in our brains, a new study suggests.

The area in question — the right parietal lobe — is responsible for defining “Me,” said researcher Brick Johnstone of Missouri University. It generates self-criticism, he said, and guides us through physical and social terrains by constantly updating our self-knowledge: my hand, my cocktail, my witty conversation skills, my new love interest …

People with less active Me-Definers are more likely to lead spiritual lives, reports the study in the current issue of the journal Zygon.

Most previous research on neuro-spirituality has been based on brain scans of actively practicing adherents (i.e. meditating monks, praying nuns) and has resulted in broad and inconclusive findings. (Is the brain area lighting up in response to verse or spiritual experience?)

Among the more spiritual of the 26 subjects, the researchers pinpointed a less functional right parietal lobe

Searchers had combed the brutal backcountry of rural Ontario for the housewife from the city of Hamilton, who had left her home three days earlier in the middle of a blizzard to grocery shop.

Alongside his search-and-rescue dog Ace, Ray Lau on Monday tramped through the thick, ice-covered brush of a farmer’s field, not far from where Molnar’s van had been found a day earlier.

He kept thinking: Negative-20 winds?This is a search for a body.

“Then, oh, all of a sudden, Ace bolted off,” said Lau. “He stooped and looked down at the snow and just barked, barked, barked.”

Lau rushed to his Dutch shepherd’s side.

“There she was, there was Donna, her face was almost totally covered except for one eye staring back at me!” he said. “That was, ‘Wow!’ There was a thousand thoughts going through my head. It was over the top.”

With one ungloved hand near her neck, Molnar, 55, mumbled and tried to scream as Lau yelled to other rescuers. Dressed in a leather coat, sweater, slacks and winter boots, Molnar was carefully extracted from a 3-foot-deep mound of snow that had apparently helped to insulate her. Watch how the rescuers found Molnar »

Don’t Miss

“She was lucid, and said, ‘Wow. I’ve been here a long time!’ and then she apologized and said, ‘I just wanted to take a walk, I’m sorry to have caused you any trouble,’ ” said Staff Sgt. Mark Cox of the HamiltonPolice Department, one of the leaders in the hunt. “And we’re all thinking this is incredible, this is really something.”

“I’ve been doing search and rescue for seven years, and this is the wildest case I’ve had in finding someone alive,” he said.

She was rushed to a hospital and immediately sedated to begin the agonizing steps of hypothermia treatment.

“I think the snow must have worked to trap her body heat, and that’s what really saved her,” Cox said. “This really speaks to what’s possible.”

Claims that Michael Jackson needs a lung transplant because of a rare respiratory disease is a “total fabrication,” according to a statement released by Jackson’s “official and sole spokesperson, Dr. Tohme Tohme” and issued by Los Angeles firm Scoop Marketing, Reuters reports.

Word of Jackson’s supposed condition – that he was suffering from Alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency – had circulated after writer Ian Halperin, who’s at work on an upcoming biography of the 50-year-old music legend, was interviewed in Britain’s Sunday Express newspaper.
– Stephen M. Silverman

Nuclear weapons cause catastrophic damage but have you ever wondered what would be the actual extent of destruction if atomic bombs of various intensity were dropped on some city?

For instance, the map of the left illustrates the damage radius if a B61 gravity bomb exploded in some part of Delhi while the right aerial map illustrates damage that can be caused by Russia’s Tsar Bomba – the largest and most powerful hydrogen bomb ever detonated.

To calculate the devastating effect of nuclear bombs on any city, go to Ground Zero – this is a Google Maps mashup that gives an idea of the damage radius that can be caused by various nuclear bombs.